Follow the Fader

Night Spa: New York’s Hottest Party

Brooklyn’s Night Spa is the kind of party that makes you question what a party really is in the first place. There’s a full-service bar and a selection of DJs handpicked from the borough’s electronic music scene (and beyond), but everybody is wearing swimsuits and white robes, and instead of dancing, they’re hanging out in saunas of various sweat-inducing temperatures and getting rubbed down by a burly masseuse. Here and there, people are congregating, but unlike your typical bar night or DIY show, there’s plenty of space to spread your wings. Promoters Phillip Beretta and Craig Klein only let about 100 people at a time into Bed-Stuy’s Body by Brooklyn, the neoclassical-looking day spa they take over for the event, and while that probably has a lot to do with keeping things safe for everyone jumping in and out of the establishment’s massive hot tub, it sure goes a long way to facilitating the night’s uniquely disorientating take on the live music experience. “To sell an event on the basis of it being a liquor-licensed showroom for [music that’s already] available online at minimal cost strikes me as an exercise in pure redundancy,” says Beretta, who sees Night Spa less as a health-conscious alternative to traditional concert-going than a means of expanding our perception of the forms that nightlife can take. Is it possible to host a “rager” that simultaneously feels meditative and spacious? As Beretta put it when we visited Body by Brooklyn on a night when Casey Spooner, Isa GT and Lauren Dillard were playing, “I don’t think that absolutely everything is too much to ask when it comes to recreation.”